September Trends: Search, Travel continue to be hot categories

With the global economy still struggling, marketers are looking for something a little extra to help plan holiday campaigns. That extra? Metrics. Hitwise, Nielsen Online and comScore, three of the largest metrics firms, have released a trio of reports that could help marketers decide where to spend online.

According to numbers from Nielsen Online Americans are visited favorite sites an average of
">53 times in September, they are visiting 87 unique domains and more than 2,600 unique webpages. Consumers are spending more than 68 hours each month online.

comScore reports that search engines are still a hot property for American consumers, who queried more than 13.5 billion questions, brand names or keywords in September. Still number one Google accounted for a 64% market share, with Yahoo bringing in an 18.8% market share. Following the Big Two search engines is Microsoft, whose Bing engine continues to show rapid growth. Microsoft's market share is hovering just below 10%. Ask Network (3.9% share) and AOL (3% share) round out the top five.

Hitwise reports that travel continues to be a hot property, with consumers finding and sticking with favored travel hubs. More than 40% of consumers visting travel industry hubs went to the Top Ten sites, which include Google Maps and MapQuest, Expedia, Southwest Airlines and Travelocity.

More important than the hottest sites, though, is how consumers are interacting with travel content. And according to Hitwise they are engaging and remaining on-site for quite a length of time. Hitwise found that the average travel visitor remained on-site for nearly eight minutes, although this is a slight decrease, it means that consumers visiting travel sites are very engaged and looking for specific information.

Put together, the search and travel trends indicate that advertising within these hubs will net the advertiser a more engaged consumer, possibly increasing campaign ROI.